Art history comes alive on the waterfront

REGINA HACKET, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

By REGINA HACKETT, P-I ART CRITIC

Published 10:00 pm, Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Although it appears Alexander Calder created "Eagle" to overlook Elliott Bay from this spot in the Olympic Sculpture Park, the artist designed the 39-foot-high steel bird in 1971, five years before his death.
Photo: Paul Joseph Brown/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Art history students study sculpture in slides projected on screens in lecture halls, what Chuck Close calls art in the dark.

Thanks to the Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle students will be able to see art historical sculptures in person and in the light.

What's there is a core and a beginning. As Seattle Art Museum curator Michael Darling pointed out, not much will change for six months to a year, and then visitors can expect temporary projects, possibly along the shoreline, and new art in the pavilion.

Althoughalmost everything was intended to be movable, some pieces fit their surroundings so well that they own them, such as "Wake."

Five asymmetrical steels slabs advance in a staggered cluster into the valley of the Olympic Sculpture Park, Serra's version of a "Wake," created to mark the passing of his friend, curator Kirk Varnedoe, in 2003.

Purchased by SAM patrons for the park, this 300-ton sculpture is a nuanced yet powerful meditation on the perceptual changes that movement brings to the geometry of matter.

Moving between these sculptural slabs, each swelling as if it had an organic root, the audience's consciousness of weight recedes, and the entire piece appears to float. Fluid in its meanings, the sculpture conveys the artist's radical intent: To own its ground with rigor and purity, and to fill the air around it with the sensations it inspires. (Photo above)

Knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1987, he remains a crucial figure in the continuing development of sculptural ideas developed in the 20th century. Born in 1924, he studied engineering and spent two years as Henry Moore's studio assistant. Shrugging off Moore's influence, he abandoned allusions to the figure and moved into fiercely high-toned abstraction.

"Riviera" from 1971-74 is a gift from Bagley and Virginia Wright that stands parallel to the park pavilion. Eleven feet high and 27 feet long, it asserts its version of the landscape with flat verticals locked into a horizontal line: elegant and full of its own understated muscle. (Photo on Page 3)

Calder designed "Eagle" in 1971, five years before his death. The 39-foot-high red steel bird looks as if the artist designed it for the edge of the bridge crossing Elliott Avenue West, which, of course, he didn't.

"Eagle" no sooner debuted than it was on the move, first to Texas and then to Philadelphia, where it stood in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art until Jon and Mary Shirley purchased it for the park. Most famed for his mobiles, Calder's "Eagle" is one of the best of his stabiles. It rests on the ground yet manages to convey an aspiration to flight. It's a wake-you-up, abstracted tribute to a rare heavyweight capable of landing lightly, its massive wings still flared before folding. (Photo above)

Because serious artists in the early 1950s shunned the banal, Oldenburg and his Pop Art cohort embraced it. By vastly expanding the size and changing the material of baseball bats and mitts, hamburgers, typewriters and toilets, he wanted us to see them in a new way. In the early 1970s, when typewriter erasers were common, he began to engage the subject. Today, most people younger than 30 have never seen one.

Oldenburg and his collaborator, van Bruggen, know that the banality of the object has given way to rarity. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who purchased it for his family collection and gave it to SAM on a three-year loan, is partly responsible for making these erasers extinct, turning a Pop celebration into an ode.

In a "Weed-Choked Garden" by Paine, thermoset plastic tomatoes rot on their polymer vines, braced by steel and covered in lacquer, looking as if nobody loves them.

In fact, everybody does.

Born in New York in 1966 and still living there, Paine is producing the most alluringly disturbing version of artificial nature since "Blade Runner." His 50-foot aluminum tree is a gift of Bagley and Virginia Wright. Titled "Split," its reflective silver steel has just a touch of the Bible's burning bush. (Photo on Page 3)

Bourgeois' father-son fountain and six eyeball benches still were being installed in the days before the park opening, but like Serra's "Wake," they are sure to draw visitors from around the world. When it comes to subverting the niceties of family relations, no artist is better.

The late Stu Smailes left $1 million to the city if it would commission a sculpture of a "fully articulated male nude" in a public fountain. The Seattle fountain is Bourgeois' first, yet she has dealt extensively with the figure in both sculptures and drawings, leaning toward stark, psychologically rich content with what would be Freudian overtones if Freud had been a woman. Father and son face each other across a watery divide, never visible to the other and never connecting. The eyeballs are functional and intended as uneasy seating.

While Serra draws inspiration from the heft of heavy metal, di Suvero finds it in the means of construction, the tools that pick up tons of steel and carry them with what looks like casual abandon.

"Bunyon's Chess" is a gift from Bagley and Virginia Wright and has been in their collection since di Suvero built it in 1965. Exuberantly raw, it stands on a hill in the park against a sweeping view of the train tracks.

Di Suvero is a better artist than speller. Bunyon refers to Paul Bunyan, the mythical lumberjack (in honor of Virginia Wright's family timber business) playing chess with a chain saw.

In an interview last year, di Suvero quoted architect Renzo Piano talking about him and getting it exactly right: "Well, Mark just picks 'em all up and moves them around with a crane, and then when he likes it, he just welds it, and turns it over sometimes."

Close to the shore, Di Suvero's "Schubert Sonata" (above), plays a heavy metal tune. Its triangular base is topped with steel plates that rotate in the winds rolling in from the Puget Sound.

The plates themselves are intended to evoke a musical note that escaped from its score to make its own outdoors sound. When trains pass, "Schubert Sonata" has the perfect partner for a dynamic duet, creaks and metal groans in stereo.

Born in Miami in 1968 and living in Brooklyn, Fernandez works primarily but not exclusively in glass. Winner last year of a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Fellowship, she creates her own spectacular weather.

SAM commissioned her to build a sheltering glass presence to front the city side of the bridge over the train tracks. As you walk on the bridge, the experience of "Seattle Cloud Cover" is anticlimactic and oddly partial, but from a distance, the drama of this color-soaked photomontage eats up the skyline with its exuberant vulgarity. (Fernandez used photos of a Miami sunset as she found Seattle's too gray.) (Photo above)

If there were a committee to bring more neon to the waterfront, it would attend the park's opening with bells on. A beacon of light against the water at night, McMakin's neon ampersand rises high over the ruin of his love-and-loss lettering.

To underscore the sweep of the theme, letters are strewn on the grass. Although not yet finished, some are benches on which viewers can sit and contemplate the state of their romance. The multi-use "O" is a fountain, and the "V" in "LOVE" is a growing tree split down the middle. (Photo above)

His concrete bench, near Calder's "Eagle," is cast concrete Minimalism.

The late Smith was part of the "primary structure" group of cool and detached sculptors in the late 1950s. Like atonal music, their work seemed inevitable at its peak but has faded as its premises recede into history.

"Wandering Rocks" (gift of Bagley and Virginia Wright) is lovely, however, and the bulky "Stinger" (gift of the Smith estate) holds its small, prefabricated moment in time. While it's meant to be a bear hug without the fur, fleas and possibility of bones being broken, once inside its charcoal embrace, not much happens. The minimalists who followed him brought more to the subject of blank clarity, but Smith at his best has a certain thin-lipped, gray-flannel-suit authority. His focus is narrow, but his execution is clean. The title, "Stinger," honors a party drink from the late 1960s. (Photo of "Stinger" on Page 2)

A Russian-born New York sculptor who died in 1988, Nevelson was the regal answer to the art of the discard. Robert Rauschenberg let trash be trash, but Nevelson assembled the tossed aside into flat wall sculptures painted a single color, usually black.

Her "Sky Landscape I" from 1976-83 is a late work in black metal, seriously cubist. There's nothing accidental about it, and no hint of recycling. Ten feet high by 10 feet wide, it's a small piece for her, discreet yet formidably beautiful, a loan from Jon and Mary Shirley.

"SEATTLE VIVARIUM" Mark Dion

SAM commissioned Dion's "Seattle Vivarium," encased in a green glass coffin. Inside, hand-painted tiles of native plants and insects, as well as tributes to famed naturalists and handy tools for taking a closer look at fungus, surround a 60-foot Western hemlock nurse log. Who could nay-say such an educational opportunity?

Nobody, if it were in the Pacific Science Center. Instead of art, it's a good-for-you pill, and the theme can't be blamed for the problem. Seattle's Buster Simpson engaged the subject of a nurse log in 1991 at Portland's Oregon Convention Center. Titled "Host Analog," it hosts a 64-foot Douglas fir with a vigorously poetic delivery.

"Seattle Vivarium" fetishizes nature with precious, dainty touches. Visitors run the risk of contracting a serious case of the cutes. (Photo below)

Thank goodness for Seattle's Rudolph, who, since 1986, happened on and off to photograph the site that became the Olympic Sculpture Park. Back when it was a parking lot, oozing oil, and a weedy patch with strangled clumps of grass growing through chain link, he was there, documenting its underworld, the people who wander around in an unsuccessful effort to get by.

Lisa Corrin recognized Rudolph's black-and-white prints for what they are, essential. They'll hang in the pavilion for at least a year. Don't miss them.

"PERRE'S VENTAGLIO III" and "PERSEPHONE UNBOUND" Beverly Pepper

Born in New York in 1924 but living much of her life in Europe, Pepper was a sculptor to contend with in the late 1960s and 1970s.

In a 1977 review, Robert Hughes wrote that size is what makes her sculptures work. Both of these Peppers, "Perre's Ventaglio III" from 1967 and "Persephone Unbound" (above) from 1999, are small, loans from Jon and Mary Shirley.

Like so much of her pseudo-ancient recent work, "Persephone Unbound" is devoid of merit, but the earlier piece is kind of fun as an eccentricity. Hers is a career that went nowhere, now richly represented at the park.

Born in 1923 in New York, Kelly is one of the 20th century's greatest colorists, noted principally for his paintings but celebrated for sculpture as well.

He favors solid colors that ride a curve or sit inside a square, making it glow.

For the park, a gift from Bagley and Virginia Wright, his "Curve XXIV" hangs just inside the shelter of the pavilion. At 6 feet high by 19 feet wide, it's a rusted steel, abstracted version of a fallen leaf, and it's terrific.

Born in 1972 in Mexico City where he still lives, Reyes was trained as an architect and made humorous use of what he knows in "Fundamentals of Pachyderm Architecture," a video he shot in 2001 in New Jersey. If only he had brought elephant drag to the park.

His floating chairs in the pavilion leave me cold and so does his mural made of interchangeable wooden parts and featuring anonymous figures, weather charts, symbols of industry and thought bubbles. He sees this mural as a tribute to Mexican muralists early in the 20th century, but it lacks their passion, politics and point. (Photo on Page 11)